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Recently, the companies involved in the smartphone business are facing various challenges and unpredictable business environment changes. Various companies strive to be the market leader through various strategies. Recently, the smartphone market has been experiencing slowdown in growth and an emergence of new brands. Under these market circumstances, display maker company LGD Mobile (where the author is employed) has also been struggling to gain market share and better profits for the last few years, despite employing various methods to counter the downturn. At present, LGD Mobile has not made any remarkable progress in this industry.
For this reason, this research adopted two methods to gain a specific solution from a customer strategy point of view: one is a case study to gain qualitative data by analyzing market trends and smartphone brand dynamics and the other is focus group interviews (FGIs) to determine implications from consumers’ mindsets regarding smartphone brands.
As an initial step, this research analyzed the smartphone market outlook. As mentioned above, the growth rate of the Chinese market, which is the main contributor to the growth of the smartphone market, also dropped from 14% in 2014 to 5% in 2015 due to saturated penetration of the smartphone. In the case of other IT products, such as notebooks, according to market survey data from IDC, three brands maintained their position in the top five from 2010 through in 2015; Acer and Toshiba were displaced by Apple and Asus. However, in the case of the smartphone market, only Apple and Samsung, which displaced Nokia and Motorola from the top spots, maintained their position in the top five smartphones list in the same time period. Nokia, the number one brand, Blackberry, the number two brand, and HTC, which was the first device with the Android OS, were all displaced from the top five by 2015. Even Samsung and Apple are struggling after facing the challenges presented by emerging Chinese smartphone makers.
For the next step, this research reviewed LGD Mobile customer portfolios and found that LGD concentrated on traditional mobile leaders, such as Nokia and Motorola, regardless of market trends by following a path similar to LG’s IT business. Moreover, the sales of LGD Mobile mainly came from a captive market—LG Electronics. The sales share of LG Electronics was 76% of the total revenue in 2015. This means that LGD Mobile’s lack of diversity in its customer base led to difficulties when its major customer was experienced a downturn.
The third step was to determine consumers’ brand preference for smartphone brands. This research conducted an FGI and assembled consumers’ perceptions and preferences for major brands in China, ranking them as high, middle, and low.
As a final step, by combining the sales trends of each brand from 2014 to 2015 and brand preference and brand preference levels, this research prioritized the customers on which LGD Mobile needs to focus by grouping the brands into five groups, A to E, from high to low priority.
It is difficult to predict what the market structure will be like in the near future, but we can surely deduce that the competition will be getting more intense than ever before. Under this circumstance, every company needs to improve its efficiency and competency to survive in the ruthlessly competitive smartphone market. This research intends to provide LGD Mobile with a more efficient framework using qualitative and quantitative data to set up a customer strategy that provides market advantages despite environment changes or challenges from competitors.
Keywords: smartphone, customer strategy, consumers’ brand preference,
focus group interview, framework, qualitative and quantitative data

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